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FESTIVALS
May Days (William Klein, 1978).
- As many as 200 French film festival workers plan to stage labor actions during Cannes, citing insufficient pay and the exclusion of many festival staff from unemployment benefits when they are not under contract. The movement is being organized under the banner of Sous Les Écrans La Dèche: Collectif Des Précaires Des Festivals De Cinéma (“Under The Screens, The Waste: The Collective of Precarious Workers at Film Festivals”).
- A new report outlines the institutional dysfunction at the Toronto International Film Festival, which recently lost the support of the telecommunications company Bell as its major sponsor.
- Citing a desire for “greater accessibility,” Slamdance Film Festival will relocate from Park City, UT, to Los Angeles in 2025.
NEWS
Harlan County, U.S.A. (Barbara Kopple, 1976).
- Now that all thirteen IATSE locals have reached tentative agreements with the AMPTP, the focus of the negotiations will move to more contentious issues: wages, residuals, working conditions, and artificial intelligence.
- Some film distributors see theatrical revivals from their back catalog as a way to reach younger audiences. Among others, Neon has rereleased Oldboy (2003) and A24 has brought back Ex Machina (2014) and Uncut Gems (2019). “We make sure that we spotlight not only who we are now but what we were in the past,” says Focus Features distribution president Lisa Bunnell.
IN PRODUCTION
- Tanigaki Kenji’s The Furious is now shooting in Bangkok with an all-star pan-Asian cast headed by Xie Miao. Producer Bill Kong (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000) has promised “an action movie that rocks the world… to prove that Hong Kong still has something to give the film industry.”
- Andrew Ahn is attached to direct a reimagining of Ang Lee’s The Wedding Banquet (1993) starring Lily Gladstone and Bowen Yang.
- Alexander Payne will make his first foray into documentary with a film about Jeanine Basinger, the esteemed film historian. On choosing a fellow Midwesterner to tell her story, Basinger remarks, “We grow up under an open and merciless sky — no place to hide — so we know how to stand up and do the job.”
REMEMBERING
The Fall (Peter Whitehead, 1969), in which Paul Auster appears among the students occupying Columbia University to protest its support of the Vietnam War apparatus (as noted by Hari Kunzru).
- Paul Auster has died at 77. The author of many acclaimed books, including The New York Trilogy (1985–87), Auster was also a filmmaker, working with Wayne Wang on Smoke and Blue in the Face (both 1995), and then solo-directing Lulu on the Bridge (1998) and The Inner Life of Martin Frost (2007). In her appreciation, Lucy Sante writes, “He was a first-class appreciator who didn’t stint on praise, whose laughs were explosive, whose speech had a characteristic rhythm, rushing forward and then drawing back, as if ebbing, to make room for his interlocutor.”
- Zack Norman has died at 83. The actor, comedian, and producer appeared in Romancing the Stone (1984) and enjoyed a long collaboration with director Henry Jaglom. He was also known for a long-running and oft-parodied ad in Variety for Chief Zabu—which he cowrote, codirected, and coproduced, and in which he stars. The film was finally released in 2016 after nearly 30 years on the shelf.
- Laurent Cantet has died at 63. The director won the Cannes Palme d’Or for The Class (2008), based on François Bégaudeau’s nonfiction book about teaching literature in Paris, and starring a cast of nonprofessional actors.
- Ray Chan has died at 56. The art director is known for his work with Marvel Studios, as well as for titles such as National Treasure (2004), Nanny McPhee (2005), and Children of Men (2006).
RECOMMENDED VIEWING
- Le Cinéma Club presents the online premiere of My Morning with Magic Mike (2023), in which John Wilson visits the great underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar at home in San Francisco, looking over his latest pornographic drawings and his brother George’s ashes before taking in the town in his trademark observational mode.
- La Cinémathèque française presents a restoration of the surviving elements of Alice Guy’s The Empress (1917), which deals in the characteristic themes for that innovator of the narrative film form: “relationships between an artist and his muse, manipulation and jealousies, but also the importance of photographic technologies altering our relationship to the truth.”
- Janus Films has released a trailer for Return to Reason (1923–29/2023), a quartet of early Man Ray films with a new soundtrack by Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s Sqürl, in select US theaters on May 15.
RECOMMENDED READING
Evil Does Not Exist (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2023).
- “I was fascinated at this idea of being sent away to remote places I’d only heard of, and there was also a sense of survivor's guilt. People either come back destroyed or never come back at all.” For Screen Slate, Elissa Suh talks to Joan Chen about Xiu Xiu: The Sent-Down Girl (1998), her directorial debut, illicitly filmed in Tibet.
- “‘How would you feel if people were really nice, and then, suddenly, on a dime’ — she snapped her fingers — ‘they turn on you?’” For the New York Times, Saskia Solomon profiles Shelley Duvall, poised for a Hollywood comeback, from the passenger seat of her car.
- “There is a waywardness to Hamaguchi’s films that belies their sense of rigor and precision, as if they were as open to contingency as their fickle characters.” For 4Columns, Leo Goldsmith reviews Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Evil Does Not Exist (2023).
RECOMMENDED LISTENING
- For the Film Comment Podcast, Devika Girish interviews Jeff Bridges, the 2024 recipient of Film at Lincoln Center’s Chaplin Award.
RECOMMENDED EVENTS
El Realismo Socialista (Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento, 1973/2023).
- New York, May 1 through 18: Peter Blum Gallery presents an exhibition of Nathaniel Dorsky’s film stills portfolio from The Arboretum Cycle. The show coincides with series at the Museum of Modern Art and Anthology Film Archives of Dorsky’s and Jerome Hiler’s films.
- London, May 8 through 12: The Institute of Contemporary Arts and Another Man present a program of Derek Jarman’s recently restored early Super-8 films.
- New York, May 8 through 12: This year’s Prismatic Ground festival includes films by Raúl Ruiz and Valeria Sarmiento, Sky Hopinka, Luke Fowler, Basma al-Sharif, Tsai Ming-liang, Antoinetta Angelidi, and many more.
RECENTLY ON NOTEBOOK
Students Stand Your Ground, Columbia University, New York City (The Illuminator; April 31, 2024). Photograph courtesy of the Illuminator.
- “In the Streets” is the first issue of the Notebook Insert, a seasonal supplement on moving-image culture. So far, Nicholas Russell has considered the relationship between the moving image and Las Vegas, his hometown, and Maxwell Paparella has written about the Illuminator, a New York–based collective that accompanies street demonstrations with large-scale video projections. Tomorrow’s installment inaugurates Multiplex, a new column, with contributions from Martine Syms, Radu Jude, Amalia Ulman, Pan Lu, and Allee Errico.
- “Although both Korea and Japan have sought to strike ‘comfort women’ from the historical record, they have still found shelter in other archives.” Jawni Han surveys the cinematic representations of Korean girls and women conscripted into sexual slavery, first by the Japanese Imperial Army and then by the US military.
- “The only thing he said to me of thematic note was, ‘Do you think people will take away that there's hope in my life?’ And I said, ‘I hope so.’” Josh Slater-Williams speaks to Kevin Macdonald about High & Low – John Galliano (2023), his documentary on the acclaimed fashion designer’s rise and fall—now showing exclusively on MUBI in many countries.
- “I know that film is a visual art. I didn't want to rely on words, or to overexplain things. Drawing the stories helped me find visual solutions.” Phuong Le interviews Isabella Rossellini about her short-form animal-kingdom web videos.